Of course there was music playing the moment we all died. I mean, statistically, somewhere in the world millions of people must have been playing or listening to music, singing or humming under their breath, screaming out lyrics into a packed barn in a field in Denmark. It just has to be true. All those songs at once, discordant, terrible, rising and falling and knotting together and stuck with missed luftpauses and jarring breaks, a piercing rolling soothing scraping falsetto baritone spinto, then suddenly – hush.

I was outside. The requiem was over. I was taking the promenade west on foot with two people. It was dusk and everything was imbued with an amaranthine glow, which is contradictory in one sense. It was spring. The people I was with were talking more than I was. I was hardly speaking, in fact. This was the normal dynamic of our trio. The two people were female. They were smaller than I was. This wasn’t surprising, as I was somewhat tall. They were both very short. They liked me for being ectomorphic. I once heard a person say, “We ectomorphs need to stick to together,” in mock camaraderie with me. I assumed it was mock. My interlocutor had been a practical stranger, and I couldn’t be completely sure she was serious or not. This is why jokes are better made among friends, I’d thought, but not long after it occurred to me people made friends by making jokes.

Last year our town finally shuttered the Church. Momentum had been growing for a long time beforehand, maybe as long as I’d been living there, maybe as long as anyone had. The will to move on from ancient religion had been growing and growing in the mind of the people, but the fact that the Mayor actually did it was seen by almost everyone, both for and against, as a landmark event. There were no voices in the middle claiming this wouldn’t impact life as we’d lived it up until then. And if there had been any claiming this, they would have been dead wrong.

One free day Josephine was window shopping like many women did and a man came to her and said, “I know you’re Josephine.” Josephine was surprised and she looked at the man, who said, “Do you remember me? About a year ago we met on a train in Taiwan and had a pleasant chat.” He was smiling in a closed way, it was September and gradually the months receded from his face and Josephine remembered: He’d sat next to her from Zuoying to Taichung, and during the three-hour ride spoke of his life, from his wife’s mania with test tubes (she was a chemist), to his colorful house parrot Bridgette and the Volkswagen he drove in New York, which was the city they were now in. Josephine said, “I remember you. You gave me a pack of pineapple cakes, but I didn’t eat them because they were expired.”

He sees me standing on the street in front of a restaurant wearing my coat with the cape. It’s night, and the light of the awning is peach. “O.K.,” he thinks. “What’s the relevance of this?” He only sees me for a few seconds, not the full time I am waiting there. He sees a man pull up in a cab, but he does not see the man in profile, as I do, because the man does not look good in profile. The man getting out of the cab is not familiar to him. The man looks like him. “When is this?” he thinks. “Is this recent?” He sees both the man’s face and mine rise as the man comes toward me. “A friend,” he tells himself. “An acquaintance. A networking thing.”

Most men in Brandsville look uncomfortable coming into a hair salon. You can tell by how they sit or how they won’t meet your eyes. There are two salons in town and only one barbershop. The old barber is about 80 years old and really starting to lose his stuff. No one blames him. He’s been at it for about sixty years.

The first time Tony rapes a woman, the violation is statutory. He is eighteen, she only fifteen, but both are otherwise consenting. They have sex in the back of his mother’s Ford Pinto while parked behind the elementary school they had both attended. A week later, he leaves for college and she starts going steady with the junior varsity quarterback. Neither thinks much about it again, although the woman briefly recalls the incident during a therapy session two decades later. She recalls his name, but his face is fuzzy. By then, several men have misused her, and her husband has done much worse. Her memory of Tony fades forever, shortly after the session.